Birmingham City Council delivered an ambitious Capital Investment Programme to manage and implement carriageway and footway improvements around the city, improving the overall condition of the network and making a positive impact to Birmingham’s residents.
The aim of the project is to improve network condition, prioritising deteriorated areas and addressing stakeholder concerns through community consultation.
Since July 2020, we delivered 316 carriageway and footway schemes, meeting ambitious programme and budget targets.
Birmingham City Council (BCC), working collaboratively with its partners at Birmingham Highways Ltd (BHL), delivered an ambitious Capital Investment Programme to manage and implement carriageway and footway improvements around the city, improving the overall condition of the network and making a positive impact to Birmingham’s residents. The Integrated Programme Alliance (IPA) was established by Arcadis, BCC, BHL, Tarmac, Kier, HTM and WJ, to deliver the Interim Works Programme (IWP), which comprised of £50m+ of network improvement works. Since July 2020, we delivered 316 carriageway and footway schemes, meeting ambitious programme and budget targets. Successful delivery led us to be awarded a further improvement programme (IWP2), to be completed in 2022, the second part of an overall £130m package of works.
Benefits to the community and contribution to the West Midlands
The aim of the project is to improve network condition, prioritising deteriorated areas and addressing stakeholder concerns through community consultation. The IPA formed specifically to enable successful delivery of IWP. Partnering workshops created a positive can-do approach; aligning stakeholders, targets and objectives agreed upfront and setting strong relationship principles. This was embedded further through the formal Relationship Management Plan aligned to BS44001. Subcontractors are part of our alliance, and everyone has a say. It was important to us that the programme was completed by local people. Engaging with local supply chains meant 66% of the footway supply chain were West Midlands based. 100% were based within the Midlands region. 5% of roles were new jobs created for local people including apprentices and graduates.
Benefits to the environment
The IPA realised carbon savings on processes and materials using innovative methods. The difference in using conventional material on surfacing schemes against warm/foam material totalled 926,992(kgCO2e), contributing to Birmingham’s decarbonisation target of 60% reduction of CO2 emissions by 2027. 100% of planings are recycled through our Asphalt plant at Washwood Heath, or the foamed asphalt recycling facility, to be used as encapsulated aggregate for reuse in footway works. We have captured £690k of savings on our Efficiencies & Innovation register from combining roadspace, incorporating cyclic activities as part of the scheme durations and accelerated programme durations from the suppliers, to maximise usage/outputs of the available closure times.
Implementation and delivery of project
Early Contractor Involvement was key in design value engineering, allowing optimisation of the specification to ensure quality and efficiency. Every scheme was walked through and inspected jointly. Engineering judgement and local knowledge was utilised throughout to provide practical solutions. Regular communications between site and design teams allowed technical queries and changes to be dealt with quickly and ensured quality of outputs.
Planning and Design
We developed a communication structure to optimise collaboration, bringing together the IPA partners. Weekly collaborative planning meetings were held to discuss and resolve issues swiftly. A steering committee of IPA’s leaders, met monthly to manage and mitigate key risks, identifying improvement opportunities. Focus groups met regularly to promote best practices on H&S, sustainability, performance and customer communication. We engaged 6-8 supply chain partners via tendering exercises to establish a competitive schedule of rates, enabling quick delivery of task orders and works on the ground. This provided SME’s visibility of a steady pipeline of local work, the confidence to invest in this project, and to ensure the completion of the works on programme. 600+ people worked on IWP at any one time on design and delivery. Programme and resource management ensured the supply chain had a smooth delivery programme and a stable resource profile. During delivery peaks where extra resource was required, this was carefully programmed and managed maintaining safety and quality
Enterprise, innovation and ingenuity
Arcadis’ innovative Smart Atlas platform collated network condition data, accident records, core data, boundary plans in one place to allow quick design decisions, allowed surveyors to record live data into the app so designers could superimpose the collective information to make informed ‘right first time’ decisions. Embedded photos that are geo-referenced and easily usable through tablets, added functionality on site diaries and records, all captured in one place and accessible by site teams and design support. Smart Atlas drives the shift towards sustainable data led decisions and ultimately improving quality of life.
PROJECT STORY
